The Blog of Lucien Stals

Some days I just *love* technology. I’ve recently been back in touch with some friends in the States which I haven’t talked to in ages. We’ve all been using the Google Talk client and loving it. But then I bought a headset thing with a mic and we actually had an hour long “talk” talk. Actual spoken word stuff. Last time I tried that, the quality was so poor that it just wasn’t worth the effort. But I guess things have gotten better. Still using the Google client, we talked for an hour with great sound quality and less delay than I would have expected from even a land line phone conversation.

And the best bit? It doesn’t cost a thing (once you buy the mic).

The Python solution got about as close as any of the rest did. The beauty of it is that it only took 3 lines of code. But in the end, it still fell over

Apparently the DOM interface of the libxml libraries only recognises 5 character entities. HTML uses more than 5, and entities like & and   just don’t get on the list. The parser falls over when it hits them. It seems to me that it should be a fairly easy task to tell it about some more entities, but I haven’t worked out how to do it yet. Everything keeps bringing me back to a SAX solution, but if I do that, I can’t use XPath!

But I’ve wasted too much time on this. It’s going to have to go on the back burner. Time to go back to making all the ADS wed pages validate.

We have a CGI script that let’s us mail form data.
We have a web based form builder that assumes a PHP script to send the form data.

I want to use the form builder to generate the forms, but refit it to send via the CGI script.

Simple, right?

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew posted a great video. I’ve seen some stuff like it before, but it’s just so cool to see people moving forward with brilliant UI stuff like this.

I expect it’ll be a while before we see stuff like this on our desktops, but I’m looking forward to it when it does.

Yey! I just set up Entourage to connect to the Groupwise server.

For some reason I thought this was going to be difficult. Everyone has said that once I’m using Groupwise, I’m stuck with the Groupwise client. But Entourage connected to the IMAP server without any trouble (I have more problems getting it to connect to the POP server previously, and that was easy). It’s even grabbing the appointments people are sending me and thanks to the fact that Groupwise appears to use the standard iCal format, the appointments are not only showing up instantly in Entourage, but are being iSync’d nicely with the iCal app.

I am a very happy camper right now

I’d been giving the Groupwise client the benefit of the doubt. But after a week of using it, it was time to move on.

Can somebody remind me what I’m using the Windows desktop machine for?

Oh yeah! No OS X client for Visual Source Safe (yet).

It’s already getting a bit dated, being about 18 months old (almost as old as my youngest son!). Apple just keeps innovating so fast, that I’m getting left behind.

Read the rest of this entry »

Week 1 of my new job.
So much to learn, but it’s bloody good fun so far.
It’s nice to know that some of the stuff I’ve been spouting for the last couple of years about standards (coding and documentation) was not just a lot of hot air. The down side is that I’m currently drowning in documentation about standards.

My accounts seem to be mainly working now, so let the coding begin!

Here’s a funny story.

For the third day in a row, several of us up here on the 5th floor of the EN building have been unable to connect to the wireless network from our laptops.

This has prompted a number of amusing calls to ITS.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow is my last day working for the Faculty of ICT. It’s a happy/sad thing.

Read the rest of this entry »